"Play again Sam". Maybe they planned this all along? So lets see what LTV tried to dump off on the PGBC? What all did they own? They were kicked out of the high courts and later went on to screw over a bunch of retired steel workers anyways. Watch the PBS video and you will see the light. In any case the light bulb that goes off in many an employers head.
Union or non union this is what its come to. It is what it is and if you and or anyone can't see themselves in that situation, may you find compassion someday. Good hard working folks, through no fault of their own, fall into societies indigent class. As their numbers grow, as the numbers of those without health care insurance grow, we are all at risk. At sometime they will be the majority? Will they opt to elect a desperate man? Desperate folks elect desperate men, as they did once in Germany.
Will they opt to elect a desperate man? Desperate folks elect desperate men, as they did once in Germany.
I thought that is what happened this last November.
You do need to read back over your posts. They all say about the same thing. People are getting shafted by corporate greed. Nothing at all about taking responsibility for your own self. Life is not easy. And expecting the government or a Union to protect you is not very smart. Of the people I associate with the ones that saved and did not run up CC debts are the ones doing fine in this recession. I see people that are broke and you go in their home and the have a 50" TV, an iPhone and half dozen other worthless gadgets all eating up their income in CC interest. Very hard to have compassion. Stupidity is rampant in our degenerate society. Over paid UAW workers just get into deeper debt than most people. The more money you make the more you waste is the American way.
Read the article again. These people were living subsistence lifestyles before they became homeless. One guy was a $12/hr. security guard, another lady was a food service worker, and another a low-level government worker. Some were working more than one job just to get by. They weren't overindulgent yuppies living in $500K McMansions, driving luxury SUVs, ringing up so much CC debt the magnetic strip wore through, and swilling Starbucks. These people are the first casualties in a recession and there are going to be a LOT more to follow. Many are not going to tolerate living in shelters and deprivation. A lot will turn to crime. A lot of others are going to adopt scary, radical political beliefs. They won't give a darn about people who saved and were financially savvy. They're going to take whatever they can from those folks and to heck with the consequences. Interesting times, indeed!
The man in your article was living in a 10' X 14' room. He was not laying on a park bench. Someone was taking care of his health needs, he just got a pacemaker. He gets fed by the Salvation Army. I would say he is very fortunate. There are 35 million people getting food stamps in the USA. The amount is more than sufficient to provide a healthy diet. There is no reason anyone in the USA should be hungry unless their parents are depriving them of the welfare the tax payers are providing.
The bottom line is there are not enough jobs to keep everyone in the USA working along with the 30 million illegals in this country. The UAW or any other unions have not done much to help. Why are thousands of UAW workers filing for bankruptcy? Where is the UAW when the workers need them? Oh, I forgot they are out playing golf on their multi million dollar course that drains the UAW every year of Millions of dollars that could be directed at helping those workers find a job in some less repressive state. Or better yet provide for training so they are not lost puppies when they lose their non skilled job.
The UAW is sort of like Hollywood. They take a nobody and make them a star. They get way more than they are worth and then just when they think they are the greatest the rug gets pulled out and they are just bums on the street. The list of actors and actresses that end up penniless is staggering. So will the list of UAW workers that thought they could spend it as fast as they made it.
PS I lived in a 10' x 10' room in a camp in the Arctic for 25 years. It could be a lot worse.
Michigan has the highest unemployment rate in the U.S. A lot of good the union did for the jobs market. At least the few that are left get that precious "working wage" as they decline rapidly in numbers. Sort of like a blue collar version of highly paid financial executives. Extort the money while the non-privileged suffer.
If the UAW really cared about jobs in the U.S. they would be taking actions to help the numbers of jobs increase in this country, rather than complaining about Toyota and BMW jobs in the south, and having so many of the upper-midwest auto jobs shipped to Mexico and that modern Ford plant in Brazil.
A lot will turn to crime. A lot of others are going to adopt scary, radical political beliefs. They're going to take whatever they can from those folks and to heck with the consequences.
They probably won't. Economists have found no statistical correlation between unemployment & crime rates. People who don't steal when they're working generally don't steal when they're unemployed. At worst, a few of them might resort to non-violent crime - shoplifting, for example - but the overall crime rate won't be affected.
Did anyone see the report on NBC's Nightly News on Friday, about the 4 laid off UAW workers? All 4 of them were taking advantage of government, GM and union sponsored retraining opportunities. One was learning to be a heavy equipment operator, another was going to be a nurse, a third was going to school to learn factory automation and robotic repair, and the forth I can't remember.
All four of them (which is probably why they were picked for the interview) realized that the jobs at the GM plant they had were never coming back. They see the handwriting on the wall - that the days of untrained workers making $35/hour are going by the wayside. A couple of 'em mention some of their former coworkers who were still, after a year or more, just sitting around, maybe going down to the union hall once in while, but not taking advantage of the retraining opportunities available to them.
This last group is like the proverbial frog in the pot of water on the stove. They are letting an opportunity to move forward slip by, hoping/expecting that somehow, someway, some magical job paying $35/hour and requiring no skills is going to appear and make things right again.
".....A couple of 'em mention some of their former coworkers who were still, after a year or more, just sitting around, maybe going down to the union hall once in while, but not taking advantage of the retraining opportunities available to them. "
I could NEVER just sit around and do nothing. If my job went, I would rather see if Verizon had employment for me elsewhere in the country, and move there. If not, and there was help for retraining, I'd go that route.
yep, me too, most of us have had a Dad or a mentor that has let us know in no uncertain terms where we'll be in a year or two if we don't go get retrained. Or if we don't move to where the jobs are.
So what if you'll have to spend money to move there. Do it and get back to work!
I must say, even though I have a good paying union job, I'm always thinking of how I could make more money on the side doing something else as well (too bad I never follow through).
One caveat though; I still say that it's not wrong to make a stand for what you believe in. If you feel you are being wronged at your job, union or not, you have an obligation to yourself to stand up and be heard. If those guys lost their jobs at that plant because they wouldn't concede to what they believed was unfair, that's fine as well.
Still, no excuse for sitting on your [non-permissible content removed] after all is said and done.
One caveat though; I still say that it's not wrong to make a stand for what you believe in. If you feel you are being wronged at your job, union or not, you have an obligation to yourself to stand up and be heard. If those guys lost their jobs at that plant because they wouldn't concede to what they believed was unfair, that's fine as well.
Still, no excuse for sitting on your [non-permissible content removed] after all is said and done.
voice be heard thing, too. It's just that simple economics get in the way of philosophical union stances, umm...don't they? Shouldn't they?
Especially if there's kids to support. It all comes back to how strong a person feels about their support of their union, I spose. Unions need strong support or they'll buckle under the pressure.
Some of them grow too big to be useful to their members or their Company any more, and then there's a big problem to have to deal with. Hence, the UAW and Chrysler, Ford and GM. :sick:
BEIJING (AP) - When the best job Mikala Reasbeck could find after college in Boston was counting pills part-time in a drugstore for $7 an hour, she took the drastic step of jumping on a plane to Beijing in February to look for work.
A week after she started looking, the 23-year-old from Wheeling, West Virginia, had a full-time job teaching English.
"I applied for jobs all over the U.S. There just weren't any," said Reasbeck, who speaks no Chinese but had volunteered at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In China, she said, "the jobs are so easy to find. And there are so many."
Young foreigners like Reasbeck are coming to China to look for work in its unfamiliar but less bleak economy, driven by the worst job markets in decades in the United States, Europe and some Asian countries.
Many do basic work such as teaching English, a service in demand from Chinese businesspeople and students. But a growing number are arriving with skills and experience in computers, finance and other fields.
"China is really the land of opportunity now, compared to their home countries," said Chris Watkins, manager for China and Hong Kong of MRI China Group, a headhunting firm. "This includes college graduates as well as maybe more established businesspeople, entrepreneurs and executives from companies around the world."
Watkins said the number of resumes his company receives from abroad has tripled over the past 18 months.
China's job market has been propped up by Beijing's 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion) stimulus, which helped to boost growth to 7.9 percent from a year earlier in the quarter that ended June 30, up from 6.1 percent the previous quarter. The government says millions of jobs will be created this year, though as many as 12 million job-seekers still will be unable to find work.
Andrew Carr, a 23-year-old Cornell University graduate, saw China as a safer alternative after classmates' offers of Wall Street jobs were withdrawn due to the economic turmoil.
Passing up opportunities in New York, San Francisco and Boston, Carr started work in August at bangyibang.com, a Web site in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen that lets the public or companies advertise and pay for help in carrying out business research, getting into schools, finding people and other tasks.
"I noticed the turn the economy was taking, and decided it would be best to go directly to China," said Carr, who studied Chinese for eight years.
Most of his classmates stayed in the United States and have taken some unusual jobs - one as a fishing guide in Alaska.
China can be more accessible to job hunters than economies where getting work permits is harder, such as Russia and some European Union countries.
Employers need government permission to hire foreigners, but authorities promise an answer within 15 working days, compared with a wait of months or longer that might be required in some other countries. An employer has to explain why it needs to hire a foreigner instead of a Chinese national, but the government says it gives special consideration to people with technical or management skills.
Rules were tightened ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, apparently to keep out possible protesters. That forced some foreign workers to leave as their visas expired.
Some 217,000 foreigners held work permits at the end of 2008, up from 210,000 a year earlier, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Thousands more use temporary business visas and go abroad regularly to renew them.
Reasbeck said it took her two months to find the drugstore job after she graduated from Boston's Emerson College with a degree in writing, literature and publishing. She said she applied to as many as 50 employers nationwide.
Today, on top of her teaching job, she works part-time recruiting other native English-speaking teachers. She makes 14,000 to 16,000 yuan ($2,000 to $2,300) a month.
"I could have a pretty comfortable life here on not a very high salary. English teachers are in high demand," she said.
Reasbeck said most of her college classmates are in part-time jobs or unemployed.
"People are sleeping on their mom's couches, as far as I know," she said.
While many jobs require at least a smattering of Chinese, some employers that need other skills are hiring people who do not speak the language.
Bangyibang.com's founder and CEO, Grant Yu, has five foreign employees in his 35-member work force. Yu plans to add more and said he might hire applicants who cannot speak Chinese if they have other skills.
"I don't believe language is the biggest obstacle in communication, as long as he or she has a strong learning ability," Yu said.
Feng Li, a partner in a Chinese-Canadian private fund in Beijing that invests in the mining industry, said he needs native speakers of foreign languages to read legal documents and communicate with clients abroad. He plans to recruit up to six foreign employees.
"We don't need Chinese guys who speak English like me," Feng said.
Some foreigners see China not just as a refuge but as a source of opportunities they might not get at home.
"Having one or two years on your resume of China experiences is only going to help you back at headquarters in the United States or if you apply for business schools," said Shaun Rein, managing director of China Market Research Group in Shanghai.
A 28-year-old former London banker took a job a year ago with a Chinese private equity firm after the crisis devastated his industry at home. He said that even though he spoke no Chinese, his experience and contacts made him a sought-after asset in China, a market that he said offers "a much faster route to a top-level position."
"I actually earn more out here," said the banker, who asked not to be identified by name at his Chinese employer's request. "And the hours are much shorter."
Konstantin Schamber, a 27-year-old German, passed up possible jobs at home to become business manager for a Beijing law firm, where he is the only foreign employee.
"I believe China is the same place as the United States used to be in the 1930s that attracts a lot of people who'd like to have either money or career opportunities," Schamber said.
Job hunters from other Asian countries also are looking to China.
An Kwang-jin, a 30-year-old South Korean photographer, has worked as a freelancer for a year in the eastern city of Qingdao. He said China offered more opportunities as South Korea struggles with a sluggish economy.
Still, foreigners will face more competition from a rising number of educated, English-speaking young Chinese, some of them returning from the West with work experience, Rein said.
"You have a lot of Chinese from top universities who are making $500-$600 a month," Rein said. "Making a case that you are much better than they are is very hard."
Economists have found no statistical correlation between unemployment & crime rates
Most of those economist weren't even born during the last great depression and or any other depression. Then again they were wrong when they wrote the economic's text books, that a bank and or insurance company were the least risky institutions in the capitalist society. By the way who hires economist besides think tanks?
Most economists these days seem to be employed by special interests who trumpet the defective Misean crap and wholeheartedly support globalization. Most are people who have never experienced the real world before.
There are three types of lies, and one of them is statistics. Anything can be twisted to fit an agenda, this one being the forced dumbing down of what is left of western civilization.
OK. So this being the UAW board, what kinds of opportunities in China for laid off UAW workers? An aside, in yesterday's Chicago newspaper want-ads was an engineering job advertised by Lemko engineering on Golf Road in Schaumburg, Illinois.
Dallasdude: Most of those economist weren't even born during the last great depression and or any other depression.
So? Economists can examine the crime statistics from the years in question. They don't have to have lived through that time in order to determine how prevelant crime was.
I'm reading a book about James Monroe, our fifth president. I'm pretty sure that the author didn't know him personally, and wasn't alive during his lifetime.
dallasdude: Then again they were wrong when they wrote the economic's text books, that a bank and or insurance company were the least risky institutions in the capitalist society.
Making a prediction about an institution's viability during various economic conditions and examining crime statistics during different periods of time are two entirely different things.
Below are two axioms which are central to economist.
If you have actuarial charts and data, there is no way you can bankrupt an insurance company.
Central banks mandate reserve requirements that require banks to keep a minimum fraction of their demand deposits as cash reserves. This both limits the amount of money creation that occurs in the commercial banking system, and ensures that banks have enough ready cash to meet normal demand for withdrawals. Fact is that if we all went to the bank on any given day and asked for our cash, they would have to fire up the presses.
The specter of 1937 hangs over the economy and the stock market.
That's the year when overconfidence that the Roosevelt administration had whipped the Great Depression and that it was time to balance the federal budget led to another deep recession that wiped out three years of growth and sent the economy reeling back to the Depression depths of 1934.
What happened? Buoyed by the economic numbers and a landslide in the 1936 election -- Franklin D. Roosevelt had defeated Republican Alf Landon of Kansas by an Electoral College vote of 523 to 8 -- the Roosevelt administration declared victory over the Great Depression.
In 1937, the Roosevelt administration and the Federal Reserve moved to reverse many of the extraordinary measures they'd taken to fight the Depression. In 1937, the federal deficit was cut to $2.5 billion from the previous year's $5.5 billion as Roosevelt and Congress slashed spending by 18%. In 1938, spending dropped still further, 10% down from the level of 1937.
And the annual deficit just about vanished. The government ran an almost-balanced budget that year with a deficit of a mere $100 million.
And the damage wasn't worse only because Roosevelt forced a change in course so quickly. By April 1938, he had pushed new large-scale spending programs, totaling $3.75 billion, through Congress. Legislators later added $1.5 billion to the pot. The Fed, under Chairman Marriner Eccles, reversed course again and started to expand the money supply.
Listen to all the voices -- not just here but even more stridently in Europe -- calling for a need to restore fiscal discipline. Listen to congressional speeches calling for the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to exit the "free market" before it's too late to save even the bones of U.S.-style capitalism and before the Obama administration sells us into, gasp, socialism. (I just wish someone, sometime making this charge would be specific about what kind of socialism he or she is talking about. Are we afraid that this administration wants this country to be Sweden or that it has a hankering for Stalin-era gulags and collective farms, where we all start the day singing to the glory of our tractors? There's a big difference. Maybe the speakers could wear hats or talk in funny accents to make their definitions clear.)
Direct from the heart of Lehman Brothers, the bank that smashed the world economy. An incredible blow-the-lid-off account of the greed, the misjudgements, the dreadful stupidity of men who should have known better. Revealed by a man who was there, the eyewitness, Larry McDonald. Anyone, laymen or expert, can understand the crucible of a Wall Street trading floor. This is a black box of secrets. And now Larry McDonald rips the lid off.
“This was a hedge fund basically that was attached to a large and stable insurance company,” Bernanke said. It “made huge numbers of irresponsible bets, took huge losses. There was no regulatory oversight because there was a gap in the system.”
‘Backup Facility’
AIG Chief Executive Officer Edward Liddy replaced Robert Willumstad in September as part of the government rescue. Liddy said on a conference call this week that the five-year $30 billion capital commitment from the Treasury is a “backup facility,” and the company has plenty of cash. AIG is focused on protecting policyholders and paying back the government, Liddy said.
AIG spokesman Christina Pretto didn’t comment beyond Liddy’s statement.
The collaboration of the UAW in this conspiracy will be cited by the Democratic Party and the media to claim that there is overwhelming support for auto workers to sacrifice. This is a lie. The UAW does not speak in the name or in the interests of ordinary working people. On the contrary, it is a corrupt apparatus whose income and privileges are derived from the services it provides to corporate management.
Workers bear no responsibility for the decisions made by the auto bosses, let alone the avarice and recklessness of Wall Street, which has brought the entire economy to the brink of collapse.
Auto workers must reject the whole framework of the debate over the bailout and intervene independently to defend their interests and those of the entire working class. This includes the preparation to reject any concessions brought back by the UAW and the launching of a national strike to defend jobs and living standards.
The most fundamental question, however, is how are the vast industrial resources, built up by generations of workers, going to be preserved and used? The auto industry, upon which millions of working people depend, can not be left in the hands of corporate executives and big investors who have driven it into the ground in order to amass huge personal fortunes.
In 1790, Congress passed the Assumption Act, by which the federal government assumed the payment of the state debts contracted during the Revolutionary War. Under the act, formerly worthless continental currency and scrip would be “assumed” at face value by the central government.
From the time that Hamilton’s assumption plan was first suggested, the otherwise worthless continental paper had been rising in price as speculators acquired it for pennies on the dollar. As passage of the Assumption Act looked more and more likely, the value of continentals rose toward par. However, in the more remote regions of the country, many people were ignorant of this development. Taking advantage of this situation, the moneyed interests of the East Coast cities, not a few of whom were members of Congress or their relatives and business associates, sent agents into every state and county to buy up the old continental paper before large numbers of people began to understand its value. In order that as few of the continental notes as possible should be left on the table, the speculators employed couriers and relay horses to reach the most isolated areas. The result was a swindle of truly national proportions, which economic historian C.M. Ewing called “the greatest financial atrocity in our national history The rich were made richer and the poor made poorer.” (He wrote this in 1930, as the Great Depression was beginning to unfold.)
Then who was Aaron Burr? Did he really shot Hamilton? Was Hamilton born on American soil? Could Hamilton ever be president?
So go out and read about real heros, such as those in the labor movement. The founders or leaders of the UAW. Walter Reuther was the real thing.
So go out and read about real heros, such as those in the labor movement. The founders or leaders of the UAW. Walter Reuther was the real thing.
Walter Reuther was a Communist sympathizer. You want to read more about the rich getting rich off the backs of poor people read about Joe Kennedy and the people he cheated out of their homes during the depression. Or how FDR made him the first head of the SEC as he knew all the dirty tricks. It is the Democrats that started destroying this nation under FDR. Reuther and his thugs were just a part of the problem.
Hamilton was a Federalist that wanted more control in Washington DC. One of the forefathers of our current Social Democrat party.
If you want to look to has really caused the mess, look at the private bankers who weaseled their way into controlling the national treasury about a century ago. These people are connected to the American interests who funded the Bolsheviks - can't be more of a "communist sympathizer" than that. These interests who later became the globalists who worked to open China have done more harm than anyone. And now they own both parties.
As a famous banker said: "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws."
dallasdude: Below are two axioms which are central to economist.
If you have actuarial charts and data, there is no way you can bankrupt an insurance company.
Neither of which prove that economists or anyone else cannot tell whether crime rises or falls during times of economic distress or prosperity.
dallasdude: That's the year when overconfidence that the Roosevelt administration had whipped the Great Depression and that it was time to balance the federal budget led to another deep recession that wiped out three years of growth and sent the economy reeling back to the Depression depths of 1934.
The economy hadn't truly recovered by 1937. Unemployment figures were much higher in 1937 than they were in the 1928, the true benchmark. Even automobile production in 1937 was below that of 1929 (a record year).
dallasdude: What happened? Buoyed by the economic numbers and a landslide in the 1936 election -- Franklin D. Roosevelt had defeated Republican Alf Landon of Kansas by an Electoral College vote of 523 to 8 -- the Roosevelt administration declared victory over the Great Depression.
Roosevelt also raised taxes on "the rich" to wipe out the deficit.
Dallasdude: Auto workers must reject the whole framework of the debate over the bailout and intervene independently to defend their interests and those of the entire working class. This includes the preparation to reject any concessions brought back by the UAW and the launching of a national strike to defend jobs and living standards.
Fine. And if the company goes bankrupt, then the workers can look for new jobs instead of using taxpayer money to keep the company running and fund the VEBA.
It's not our responsbility to support companies that large numbers of customers have rejected. If people wanted to support GM, then they would buy a GM product. If not enough customers want to buy GM products in order for the company to maintain its current cost structure, then something has to give.
Right now the threat to my living standards is the threat of rising taxes because of all of these bailouts, including the use of government money to support zombie companies that large numbers of buyers have rejected.
dallasdude: The most fundamental question, however, is how are the vast industrial resources, built up by generations of workers, going to be preserved and used?
The resources were built by investors and inventors with new ideas. The workers were well paid to put the pieces together, but building a car isn't the same as building a company.
dallasdude: The auto industry, upon which millions of working people depend, can not be left in the hands of corporate executives and big investors who have driven it into the ground in order to amass huge personal fortunes.
What drove GM and Chrysler into the ground was the refusal of executives and the UAW to accept the basic truth of manufacturing - namely, that it succeeds by becoming more efficient.
Manufacturing becomes more efficient by using fewer resources and people to produce the same or more amount of goods.
The UAW, however, thought that the reason GM and Chrysler existed was to provide jobs and benefits to workers, not make products that people wanted to buy. Management went along because it was easier to do, and because they really thought that those new products "just around the corner" could regain the lost market share.
The simple fact is that GM, in particular, needed to shrink about 20 years ago by consolidating factories, ditching the Jobs Bank, thinning the model lineup (and possibly combining divisions), and bringing health care benefits into line with those of the transplants. It also needed to use only as many workers to build a vehicle as Toyota and Honda did.
The UAW wouldn't hear of it.
To overcome the fact that it needed to keep more workers on the payroll than Toyota and Honda did, which increased its structural costs, GM relied on higher profit trucks and SUVs and cut corners and then used incentives and fleet sales to keep the lines running for its passenger cars. That strategy was bound to fail - it badly damaged ALL of GM's brands - and would have done so even if the economy had not skidded to a recession.
The simple fact is that the UAW wants the taxpayer to support a failed business model. It has nothing to do with "preserving the middle class," the great majority of whom do not work for GM or Chrysler and do not receive wages and benefits comparable to those of UAW members. It's more like robbing Taxpayer Peter to pay GM executive, GM dealer and UAW worker Paul. That isn't creating growth or more employment or preserving the middle class; it's shuffling money from one less powerful group (taxpayers) to the more politically connected players.
And please note that the domestic auto industry now includes the North American-based operations of Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, BMW and Mercedes. It isn't limited to the Big Three anymore.
The resources were built by investors and inventors with new ideas. The workers were well paid to put the pieces together, but building a car isn't the same as building a company.
Something the UAW hates to admit. Investors & Inventors are unique individuals. Us workers are plentiful and a commodity that is governed strictly by supply and demand. With 30 Million illegals about to become legal immigrants the work pool becomes further diluted making the $15 per hour non skilled UAW workers even less valuable. Ask the CA grocery workers that went on strike and ended up with minimum wage new hires.
And please note that the domestic auto industry now includes the North American-based operations of Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, BMW and Mercedes. It isn't limited to the Big Three anymore.
And soon to be VW and Audi. There will be US workers building cars. Just not as many in the old D3 UAW. The states losing out need to grab a hold of the UAW leadership and let them know they are no longer welcome in their states. Pass right to work and get some of the jobs back. Only a dumb investor would take a chance on manufacturing in Michigan with the Union entitlement mentality.
I don't think they were sympathizers; they just met a need (for capital). The money changer houses got set up in Amsterdam and Lyon at least as far back as the 1600s doing bills of exchanges and commodities trading. I don't think they much cared back then which king or which wars they were helping to finance.
"United Auto Workers members working for Deere & Co. have voted overwhelmingly to authorize union negotiators to call a strike, if necessary, in their contract talks with the company.
UAW locals voted 98.1 percent in favor of strike authorization..."
"United Auto Workers members working for Deere & Co. have voted overwhelmingly to authorize union negotiators to call a strike, if necessary, in their contract talks with the company.
UAW locals voted 98.1 percent in favor of strike authorization..."
Will they ever learn???...even a dog or cat eventually learns from their mistakes, but when I said the low-IQ idiots of the UAW, I never REALLY knew how accurate I was...
I am sure the Chinese will welcome more farm implement manufacturing. Or better if it is Mexico. Keep a few more working below the border. I cannot imagine the UAW leaders advocating a strike in this economy. They may end up with an extended vacation without pay.
Oops, wrong discussion and it wasn't new. I was on the 4 lane highway going through one of the bedroom towns here, when it passed going the other way, pulling an old small sized hay baler. Looked like it was well screwed together too.
My Kubota was built in Japan. The roto tiller and brush hog in Italy. I think the UAW already ran off the small farm equipment manufacturing. Give them time they will get rid of the big stuff as well.
".....Will they ever learn???...even a dog or cat eventually learns from their mistakes, but when I said the low-IQ idiots of the UAW, I never REALLY knew how accurate I was... "
Ok, so I read the article, and this is in it............
".....The UAW and Deere are renegotiating terms of a six-year agreement that expires Sept. 30. The strike authorization vote has historically been considered a formality in Deere-UAW talks as the contract deadline approaches.
The parties may continue negotiating beyond the Sept. 30 deadline under an extension of the existing agreement"
...........and realize that, based on my experience, your comments are much ado about nothing. Strike autorization votes are taken in advance of expiring contracts "just in case". In the last 4 contract negotiations our IBEW locals have had with Verizon, we have authorized a strike 4 TIMES!!! Guess what?? Only once, in 2000, did we actually strike, and it was for 2 weeks. The consensus among us was that Verizon management held out for that long so it would make the national news, as Bell Atlantic and GTE had just merged weeks prior, and the Verizon name was only out for a few weeks (in other words, FREE ADVERTISING).
The last 3 negotiations continued well past the deadline, and we worked under the expired contract, and it was NO BIG DEAL.
You are talking about the IBEW with a history of smarter choices. Knowing when and when NOT to strike being key. The UAW went on strike last year with GM losing $40 billion dollars in one year. The UAW went on strike against Bell Helicopter in June. After 5 weeks they got less than they were offered before the strike started. You cannot compare the UAW to sane Unions with some sense of reality. Though even the leaders of the UAW were against the strike against Bell. Maybe the UAW leadership is finally waking up and smelling the coffee. The UAW membership is down to about 25% of their peak of 1.5 million members. Not the kind of Union I would want to be a part of.
And please note that the domestic auto industry now includes the North American-based operations of Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, BMW and Mercedes. It isn't limited to the Big Three anymore.
No one is playing by the same rules. If the American consumer knew about the environmental crimes, exploitation of child labor, and the rape of the planet, this whole thing would come to an end. They would opt to buy UAW and or union made in America. All of these companies are backed by their nations respectively. Or is the China tire event a aberration? Wake up and smell the coffee. The free market capitalism is but an ideal. Not to mention that trading with China is outright support of communist ideals, and their oppression of mankind. Those millionaires being made in China are just high level communist officials and their relatives want the status quo to linger for as long as it can. No multinational corporation run a gov't for the purpose of profit? Casting aside Cuba, a lesser oppressor of its population, to go after market share in the golden China, in their blinding greed. Get with it, if it weren't for unions you wouldn't be as fortunate as you are now. To label a union man such as Walter "communist" is not going to work these days, as it did in the day of Joe McCarthy. Your going to have to find evidence of his selfishness and not of selflessness. Sorry I had to dls-spell the myth, which you may have had for decades now, of the founding fathers being crooks, no better than those of today.
Not to mention that trading with China is outright support of communist ideals, and their oppression of mankind.
I am glad to see your anti communist sentiments. However you seem to gloss over the FACT that Walter Reuther was a communist sympathizer. He was one of the elites you seem to hate. He would have been a Communist party boss in the USSA if FDR had gotten his way.
Reuther was a Socialist party member; he may have paid dues to the Communist Party for some months in 1935-36; he has been accused of attending a Communist Party planning meeting as late as February 1939. Reuther cooperated with the Communists in the later 1930s; this was the period of the Popular Front, and they agreed with him on internal issues of the UAWwiki
And I realize he waffled in later years. Which was a smokescreen to his true Socialist beliefs.
I would be fine not allowing any product into the USA that is produced with child labor under the age of 12. Or is highly polluting the environment. Not just CO2. Though I was working a lot way before the age of 12, mowing lawns and doing yard work all over our neighborhood. I had no Union and did not need one. Kids should have jobs to teach the a work ethic that is all but missing in today's society. Much of it perpetrated by lazy featherbedding Unions like the UAW.
That post has nothing to do with why GM and Chrysler are in trouble. China is irrelevant to the problems of the Big Three; no Chinese-made cars are sold in the U.S.
Toyota, Honda, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes and Hyundai are building cars HERE, in the U.S. and Canada. They are not building them in China for export to the U.S.
GM and Chrysler are getting beaten by manufacturers who are building their products here, or in Europe, Japan and South Korea, which do not use child labor and have strict environmental regulations.
dallasdude: To label a union man such as Walter "communist" is not going to work these days, as it did in the day of Joe McCarthy. Your going to have to find evidence of his selfishness and not of selflessness.
I don't have to find anything, because I never mentioned Mr. Reuther in my posts, and never called him a communist. :confuse:
dallasdude: Sorry I had to dls-spell the myth, which you may have had for decades now, of the founding fathers being crooks, no better than those of today.
I never made that allegation. It's best to respond to what other posters actually said, not what you imagine they had said.
Just happened to look at MO school pay from top to bottom in the news. It looks like the highest paid teacher in the state of MO makes less than the average UAW fork lift operator. Something wrong with that picture. $100k plus for an entry level job like fork lift operator makes no sense at all. That is the reason we are bailing out the auto industry. That and poor management. Top paid teacher in MO will make $88,043 this school year.
GM and Chrysler are getting beaten by manufacturers who are building their products here, or in Europe, Japan and South Korea, which do not use child labor and have strict environmental regulations.
GM and Chrysler will continue to be beaten as long as the UAW stays in force. That's a simple fact that is as clear as daylight.
OK let the fecal matter flinging beginnnnn.......................................................................- ................................................................................- ................................................................................- ...................................NOW!!!!! (duck) :surprise:
"..... Knowing when and when NOT to strike being key. "
That is a great point. But until they do, and until we find out if it was worth it, it is what it is. Just a vote. Everybody is still working (for now)
".....Those millionaires being made in China are just high level communist officials and their relatives want the status quo to linger for as long as it can"
HEY!!! WAIT A MINUTE!!!! Those millionare commies are buying American built (in some cases, like the Enclave) BUICKS. Even if they are built in China, GM still profits. So, they can't ALL be bad. :P
"I am in the unique position in American life where I am the hate man for the right wing and the hate man for the Communists all at the same time," he said. "It never bothered me. I don't think it is difficult to understand because both extremes always converge against the democratic middle. The Communists supported Hitler's rise to power. The extremes converge against the democratic middle because both are really in opposition to the democratic process. They are motivated by different values in their political behavior but their technique is the same.
"Why do Communists think I'm dangerous and why does the right wing think I'm dangerous? It's because I'm committed, I think, to basically trying to find a way to make our free society responsive to human needs and only as we make it more responsive can we make it work and succeed. And to the extent we make it succeed, we frustrate their hopes and their plans. The John Birch Society is really a kind of fifth column for the Communists and the Communists are really a kind of fifth column for the John Birch Society. They'd die if you tried to make them believe this but these are the facts of history - the extreme forces in any situation always converge against the middle."
Reuther is not a socialist. Neither is he an uncritical admirer of free enterprise. He believes in what he calls an economic mix. That is, free enterprise - "the market place" - should be given the opportunity and incentive for doing what it does best, as building automobiles. In other areas, such as education and housing, he feels that government and individuals have a role to play.
That doesn't make sense. Were the Toyota sludge (gel ) makers thus because they were assembled by nonunion labor? Or they were made in Japan or somewhere Asian and shipped here? Honda transmission problems (see current Odyssey discussion) because they are assembled by nonunion or are shipped here from Japan?
Actually the non-union workers that built my Sequoia in Indiana did a very good job. It was Toyota cutting costs with cheap Chinese electronics that has been a disappointment. It was UAW workers in Indiana that slapped my GMC PU truck together without making sure all the parts fit well. Which leads me to believe that workers in the Midwest are very capable until they get a UAW contract to hide behind. Then they think they can get away with poor workmanship. So I have no problem buying a vehicle built in the USA. Until the UAW gets an attitude adjustment, I will avoid vehicles they have built. My two Canadian built GM PU trucks and my Mexican built PU truck and Suburban were all very good. To me that points a finger directly at the UAW.
That was exactly my point but some missed the point as an E-4 passed overhead.
The workers assemble what they're given. If the assembly in not correct, then the workers may be to blame; otherwise, it is the company that's responsible.
But it is the workers who can put pins and other parts on backwards, or force a nut on a bolt and strip the thread, so it stays together for about 10K miles, and then simple road vibration causes it to fall apart...the workers can put on a door and if they don't line things up, the door scrapes or will not close properly...same with hoods and trunks...
When they have the UAW lable, it seems their brains turn to jello and the concept of "pride and workmanship" leaves their cerebral cortex...that is why I think the UAW did more to destroy the Big 3 than the engineers did when they designed the Buick Roadmaster, a vehicle that makes a Mack Truck look small and narrow...
What's wrong with the Buick Roadmaster? I absolutely love the Buick Roadmaster, especially the 1994-96 models with the LT-1 derived V-8s. Not all of us want some dainty little econobox. I love that name - Roadmaster -the master of the road!!! :shades:
Comments
My exact question. The UAW hasn't asked for any TARP money? Is the UAW going to fold?
"Play again Sam". Maybe they planned this all along? So lets see what LTV tried to dump off on the PGBC? What all did they own? They were kicked out of the high courts and later went on to screw over a bunch of retired steel workers anyways. Watch the PBS video and you will see the light. In any case the light bulb that goes off in many an employers head.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/retirement/stories/
Union or non union this is what its come to. It is what it is and if you and or anyone can't see themselves in that situation, may you find compassion someday. Good hard working folks, through no fault of their own, fall into societies indigent class. As their numbers grow, as the numbers of those without health care insurance grow, we are all at risk. At sometime they will be the majority? Will they opt to elect a desperate man? Desperate folks elect desperate men, as they did once in Germany.
I thought that is what happened this last November.
You do need to read back over your posts. They all say about the same thing. People are getting shafted by corporate greed. Nothing at all about taking responsibility for your own self. Life is not easy. And expecting the government or a Union to protect you is not very smart. Of the people I associate with the ones that saved and did not run up CC debts are the ones doing fine in this recession. I see people that are broke and you go in their home and the have a 50" TV, an iPhone and half dozen other worthless gadgets all eating up their income in CC interest. Very hard to have compassion. Stupidity is rampant in our degenerate society. Over paid UAW workers just get into deeper debt than most people. The more money you make the more you waste is the American way.
Regards,
OW
The bottom line is there are not enough jobs to keep everyone in the USA working along with the 30 million illegals in this country. The UAW or any other unions have not done much to help. Why are thousands of UAW workers filing for bankruptcy? Where is the UAW when the workers need them? Oh, I forgot they are out playing golf on their multi million dollar course that drains the UAW every year of Millions of dollars that could be directed at helping those workers find a job in some less repressive state. Or better yet provide for training so they are not lost puppies when they lose their non skilled job.
The UAW is sort of like Hollywood. They take a nobody and make them a star. They get way more than they are worth and then just when they think they are the greatest the rug gets pulled out and they are just bums on the street. The list of actors and actresses that end up penniless is staggering. So will the list of UAW workers that thought they could spend it as fast as they made it.
PS
I lived in a 10' x 10' room in a camp in the Arctic for 25 years. It could be a lot worse.
If the UAW really cared about jobs in the U.S. they would be taking actions to help the numbers of jobs increase in this country, rather than complaining about Toyota and BMW jobs in the south, and having so many of the upper-midwest auto jobs shipped to Mexico and that modern Ford plant in Brazil.
They probably won't. Economists have found no statistical correlation between unemployment & crime rates. People who don't steal when they're working generally don't steal when they're unemployed. At worst, a few of them might resort to non-violent crime - shoplifting, for example - but the overall crime rate won't be affected.
All four of them (which is probably why they were picked for the interview) realized that the jobs at the GM plant they had were never coming back. They see the handwriting on the wall - that the days of untrained workers making $35/hour are going by the wayside. A couple of 'em mention some of their former coworkers who were still, after a year or more, just sitting around, maybe going down to the union hall once in while, but not taking advantage of the retraining opportunities available to them.
This last group is like the proverbial frog in the pot of water on the stove. They are letting an opportunity to move forward slip by, hoping/expecting that somehow, someway, some magical job paying $35/hour and requiring no skills is going to appear and make things right again.
I could NEVER just sit around and do nothing. If my job went, I would rather see if Verizon had employment for me elsewhere in the country, and move there. If not, and there was help for retraining, I'd go that route.
Kudos to them for bettering themselves.
So what if you'll have to spend money to move there. Do it and get back to work!
2021 Kia Soul LX 6-speed stick
One caveat though; I still say that it's not wrong to make a stand for what you believe in. If you feel you are being wronged at your job, union or not, you have an obligation to yourself to stand up and be heard. If those guys lost their jobs at that plant because they wouldn't concede to what they believed was unfair, that's fine as well.
Still, no excuse for sitting on your [non-permissible content removed] after all is said and done.
Still, no excuse for sitting on your [non-permissible content removed] after all is said and done.
Two very wise paragraphs.
Especially if there's kids to support. It all comes back to how strong a person feels about their support of their union, I spose. Unions need strong support or they'll buckle under the pressure.
Some of them grow too big to be useful to their members or their Company any more, and then there's a big problem to have to deal with. Hence, the UAW and Chrysler, Ford and GM. :sick:
2021 Kia Soul LX 6-speed stick
By BONNIE CAO
BEIJING (AP) - When the best job Mikala Reasbeck could find after college in Boston was counting pills part-time in a drugstore for $7 an hour, she took the drastic step of jumping on a plane to Beijing in February to look for work.
A week after she started looking, the 23-year-old from Wheeling, West Virginia, had a full-time job teaching English.
"I applied for jobs all over the U.S. There just weren't any," said Reasbeck, who speaks no Chinese but had volunteered at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In China, she said, "the jobs are so easy to find. And there are so many."
Young foreigners like Reasbeck are coming to China to look for work in its unfamiliar but less bleak economy, driven by the worst job markets in decades in the United States, Europe and some Asian countries.
Many do basic work such as teaching English, a service in demand from Chinese businesspeople and students. But a growing number are arriving with skills and experience in computers, finance and other fields.
"China is really the land of opportunity now, compared to their home countries," said Chris Watkins, manager for China and Hong Kong of MRI China Group, a headhunting firm. "This includes college graduates as well as maybe more established businesspeople, entrepreneurs and executives from companies around the world."
Watkins said the number of resumes his company receives from abroad has tripled over the past 18 months.
China's job market has been propped up by Beijing's 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion) stimulus, which helped to boost growth to 7.9 percent from a year earlier in the quarter that ended June 30, up from 6.1 percent the previous quarter. The government says millions of jobs will be created this year, though as many as 12 million job-seekers still will be unable to find work.
Andrew Carr, a 23-year-old Cornell University graduate, saw China as a safer alternative after classmates' offers of Wall Street jobs were withdrawn due to the economic turmoil.
Passing up opportunities in New York, San Francisco and Boston, Carr started work in August at bangyibang.com, a Web site in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen that lets the public or companies advertise and pay for help in carrying out business research, getting into schools, finding people and other tasks.
"I noticed the turn the economy was taking, and decided it would be best to go directly to China," said Carr, who studied Chinese for eight years.
Most of his classmates stayed in the United States and have taken some unusual jobs - one as a fishing guide in Alaska.
China can be more accessible to job hunters than economies where getting work permits is harder, such as Russia and some European Union countries.
Employers need government permission to hire foreigners, but authorities promise an answer within 15 working days, compared with a wait of months or longer that might be required in some other countries. An employer has to explain why it needs to hire a foreigner instead of a Chinese national, but the government says it gives special consideration to people with technical or management skills.
Rules were tightened ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, apparently to keep out possible protesters. That forced some foreign workers to leave as their visas expired.
Some 217,000 foreigners held work permits at the end of 2008, up from 210,000 a year earlier, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Thousands more use temporary business visas and go abroad regularly to renew them.
Reasbeck said it took her two months to find the drugstore job after she graduated from Boston's Emerson College with a degree in writing, literature and publishing. She said she applied to as many as 50 employers nationwide.
Today, on top of her teaching job, she works part-time recruiting other native English-speaking teachers. She makes 14,000 to 16,000 yuan ($2,000 to $2,300) a month.
"I could have a pretty comfortable life here on not a very high salary. English teachers are in high demand," she said.
Reasbeck said most of her college classmates are in part-time jobs or unemployed.
"People are sleeping on their mom's couches, as far as I know," she said.
While many jobs require at least a smattering of Chinese, some employers that need other skills are hiring people who do not speak the language.
Bangyibang.com's founder and CEO, Grant Yu, has five foreign employees in his 35-member work force. Yu plans to add more and said he might hire applicants who cannot speak Chinese if they have other skills.
"I don't believe language is the biggest obstacle in communication, as long as he or she has a strong learning ability," Yu said.
Feng Li, a partner in a Chinese-Canadian private fund in Beijing that invests in the mining industry, said he needs native speakers of foreign languages to read legal documents and communicate with clients abroad. He plans to recruit up to six foreign employees.
"We don't need Chinese guys who speak English like me," Feng said.
Some foreigners see China not just as a refuge but as a source of opportunities they might not get at home.
"Having one or two years on your resume of China experiences is only going to help you back at headquarters in the United States or if you apply for business schools," said Shaun Rein, managing director of China Market Research Group in Shanghai.
A 28-year-old former London banker took a job a year ago with a Chinese private equity firm after the crisis devastated his industry at home. He said that even though he spoke no Chinese, his experience and contacts made him a sought-after asset in China, a market that he said offers "a much faster route to a top-level position."
"I actually earn more out here," said the banker, who asked not to be identified by name at his Chinese employer's request. "And the hours are much shorter."
Konstantin Schamber, a 27-year-old German, passed up possible jobs at home to become business manager for a Beijing law firm, where he is the only foreign employee.
"I believe China is the same place as the United States used to be in the 1930s that attracts a lot of people who'd like to have either money or career opportunities," Schamber said.
Job hunters from other Asian countries also are looking to China.
An Kwang-jin, a 30-year-old South Korean photographer, has worked as a freelancer for a year in the eastern city of Qingdao. He said China offered more opportunities as South Korea struggles with a sluggish economy.
Still, foreigners will face more competition from a rising number of educated, English-speaking young Chinese, some of them returning from the West with work experience, Rein said.
"You have a lot of Chinese from top universities who are making $500-$600 a month," Rein said. "Making a case that you are much better than they are is very hard."
Most of those economist weren't even born during the last great depression and or any other depression. Then again they were wrong when they wrote the economic's text books, that a bank and or insurance company were the least risky institutions in the capitalist society. By the way who hires economist besides think tanks?
There are three types of lies, and one of them is statistics. Anything can be twisted to fit an agenda, this one being the forced dumbing down of what is left of western civilization.
So? Economists can examine the crime statistics from the years in question. They don't have to have lived through that time in order to determine how prevelant crime was.
I'm reading a book about James Monroe, our fifth president. I'm pretty sure that the author didn't know him personally, and wasn't alive during his lifetime.
dallasdude: Then again they were wrong when they wrote the economic's text books, that a bank and or insurance company were the least risky institutions in the capitalist society.
Making a prediction about an institution's viability during various economic conditions and examining crime statistics during different periods of time are two entirely different things.
If you have actuarial charts and data, there is no way you can bankrupt an insurance company.
Central banks mandate reserve requirements that require banks to keep a minimum fraction of their demand deposits as cash reserves. This both limits the amount of money creation that occurs in the commercial banking system, and ensures that banks have enough ready cash to meet normal demand for withdrawals. Fact is that if we all went to the bank on any given day and asked for our cash, they would have to fire up the presses.
The specter of 1937 hangs over the economy and the stock market.
That's the year when overconfidence that the Roosevelt administration had whipped the Great Depression and that it was time to balance the federal budget led to another deep recession that wiped out three years of growth and sent the economy reeling back to the Depression depths of 1934.
What happened? Buoyed by the economic numbers and a landslide in the 1936 election -- Franklin D. Roosevelt had defeated Republican Alf Landon of Kansas by an Electoral College vote of 523 to 8 -- the Roosevelt administration declared victory over the Great Depression.
In 1937, the Roosevelt administration and the Federal Reserve moved to reverse many of the extraordinary measures they'd taken to fight the Depression. In 1937, the federal deficit was cut to $2.5 billion from the previous year's $5.5 billion as Roosevelt and Congress slashed spending by 18%. In 1938, spending dropped still further, 10% down from the level of 1937.
And the annual deficit just about vanished. The government ran an almost-balanced budget that year with a deficit of a mere $100 million.
And the damage wasn't worse only because Roosevelt forced a change in course so quickly. By April 1938, he had pushed new large-scale spending programs, totaling $3.75 billion, through Congress. Legislators later added $1.5 billion to the pot. The Fed, under Chairman Marriner Eccles, reversed course again and started to expand the money supply.
Listen to all the voices -- not just here but even more stridently in Europe -- calling for a need to restore fiscal discipline. Listen to congressional speeches calling for the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to exit the "free market" before it's too late to save even the bones of U.S.-style capitalism and before the Obama administration sells us into, gasp, socialism. (I just wish someone, sometime making this charge would be specific about what kind of socialism he or she is talking about. Are we afraid that this administration wants this country to be Sweden or that it has a hankering for Stalin-era gulags and collective farms, where we all start the day singing to the glory of our tractors? There's a big difference. Maybe the speakers could wear hats or talk in funny accents to make their definitions clear.)
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/JubaksJournal/will-us-repeat-mist- akes-of-1937.aspx?page=2
Direct from the heart of Lehman Brothers, the bank that smashed the world economy. An incredible blow-the-lid-off account of the greed, the misjudgements, the dreadful stupidity of men who should have known better. Revealed by a man who was there, the eyewitness, Larry McDonald. Anyone, laymen or expert, can understand the crucible of a Wall Street trading floor. This is a black box of secrets. And now Larry McDonald rips the lid off.
http://www.derivsource.com/articles/new-book-out-july-fall-lehman-brothers
“This was a hedge fund basically that was attached to a large and stable insurance company,” Bernanke said. It “made huge numbers of irresponsible bets, took huge losses. There was no regulatory oversight because there was a gap in the system.”
‘Backup Facility’
AIG Chief Executive Officer Edward Liddy replaced Robert Willumstad in September as part of the government rescue. Liddy said on a conference call this week that the five-year $30 billion capital commitment from the Treasury is a “backup facility,” and the company has plenty of cash. AIG is focused on protecting policyholders and paying back the government, Liddy said.
AIG spokesman Christina Pretto didn’t comment beyond Liddy’s statement.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=atQmLZzMb8i8
The collaboration of the UAW in this conspiracy will be cited by the Democratic Party and the media to claim that there is overwhelming support for auto workers to sacrifice. This is a lie. The UAW does not speak in the name or in the interests of ordinary working people. On the contrary, it is a corrupt apparatus whose income and privileges are derived from the services it provides to corporate management.
Workers bear no responsibility for the decisions made by the auto bosses, let alone the avarice and recklessness of Wall Street, which has brought the entire economy to the brink of collapse.
Auto workers must reject the whole framework of the debate over the bailout and intervene independently to defend their interests and those of the entire working class. This includes the preparation to reject any concessions brought back by the UAW and the launching of a national strike to defend jobs and living standards.
The most fundamental question, however, is how are the vast industrial resources, built up by generations of workers, going to be preserved and used? The auto industry, upon which millions of working people depend, can not be left in the hands of corporate executives and big investors who have driven it into the ground in order to amass huge personal fortunes.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/dec2008/pers-d03.shtml
From the time that Hamilton’s assumption plan was first suggested, the otherwise worthless continental paper had been rising in price as speculators acquired it for pennies on the dollar. As passage of the Assumption Act looked more and more likely, the value of continentals rose toward par. However, in the more remote regions of the country, many people were ignorant of this development. Taking advantage of this situation, the moneyed interests of the East Coast cities, not a few of whom were members of Congress or their relatives and business associates, sent agents into every state and county to buy up the old continental paper before large numbers of people began to understand its value. In order that as few of the continental notes as possible should be left on the table, the speculators employed couriers and relay horses to reach the most isolated areas. The result was a swindle of truly national proportions, which economic historian C.M. Ewing called “the greatest financial atrocity in our national history The rich were made richer and the poor made poorer.” (He wrote this in 1930, as the Great Depression was beginning to unfold.)
Then who was Aaron Burr? Did he really shot Hamilton? Was Hamilton born on American soil? Could Hamilton ever be president?
So go out and read about real heros, such as those in the labor movement. The founders or leaders of the UAW. Walter Reuther was the real thing.
Walter Reuther was a Communist sympathizer. You want to read more about the rich getting rich off the backs of poor people read about Joe Kennedy and the people he cheated out of their homes during the depression. Or how FDR made him the first head of the SEC as he knew all the dirty tricks. It is the Democrats that started destroying this nation under FDR. Reuther and his thugs were just a part of the problem.
Hamilton was a Federalist that wanted more control in Washington DC. One of the forefathers of our current Social Democrat party.
As a famous banker said: "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws."
If you have actuarial charts and data, there is no way you can bankrupt an insurance company.
Neither of which prove that economists or anyone else cannot tell whether crime rises or falls during times of economic distress or prosperity.
dallasdude: That's the year when overconfidence that the Roosevelt administration had whipped the Great Depression and that it was time to balance the federal budget led to another deep recession that wiped out three years of growth and sent the economy reeling back to the Depression depths of 1934.
The economy hadn't truly recovered by 1937. Unemployment figures were much higher in 1937 than they were in the 1928, the true benchmark. Even automobile production in 1937 was below that of 1929 (a record year).
dallasdude: What happened? Buoyed by the economic numbers and a landslide in the 1936 election -- Franklin D. Roosevelt had defeated Republican Alf Landon of Kansas by an Electoral College vote of 523 to 8 -- the Roosevelt administration declared victory over the Great Depression.
Roosevelt also raised taxes on "the rich" to wipe out the deficit.
Dallasdude: Auto workers must reject the whole framework of the debate over the bailout and intervene independently to defend their interests and those of the entire working class. This includes the preparation to reject any concessions brought back by the UAW and the launching of a national strike to defend jobs and living standards.
Fine. And if the company goes bankrupt, then the workers can look for new jobs instead of using taxpayer money to keep the company running and fund the VEBA.
It's not our responsbility to support companies that large numbers of customers have rejected. If people wanted to support GM, then they would buy a GM product. If not enough customers want to buy GM products in order for the company to maintain its current cost structure, then something has to give.
Right now the threat to my living standards is the threat of rising taxes because of all of these bailouts, including the use of government money to support zombie companies that large numbers of buyers have rejected.
dallasdude: The most fundamental question, however, is how are the vast industrial resources, built up by generations of workers, going to be preserved and used?
The resources were built by investors and inventors with new ideas. The workers were well paid to put the pieces together, but building a car isn't the same as building a company.
dallasdude: The auto industry, upon which millions of working people depend, can not be left in the hands of corporate executives and big investors who have driven it into the ground in order to amass huge personal fortunes.
What drove GM and Chrysler into the ground was the refusal of executives and the UAW to accept the basic truth of manufacturing - namely, that it succeeds by becoming more efficient.
Manufacturing becomes more efficient by using fewer resources and people to produce the same or more amount of goods.
The UAW, however, thought that the reason GM and Chrysler existed was to provide jobs and benefits to workers, not make products that people wanted to buy. Management went along because it was easier to do, and because they really thought that those new products "just around the corner" could regain the lost market share.
The simple fact is that GM, in particular, needed to shrink about 20 years ago by consolidating factories, ditching the Jobs Bank, thinning the model lineup (and possibly combining divisions), and bringing health care benefits into line with those of the transplants. It also needed to use only as many workers to build a vehicle as Toyota and Honda did.
The UAW wouldn't hear of it.
To overcome the fact that it needed to keep more workers on the payroll than Toyota and Honda did, which increased its structural costs, GM relied on higher profit trucks and SUVs and cut corners and then used incentives and fleet sales to keep the lines running for its passenger cars. That strategy was bound to fail - it badly damaged ALL of GM's brands - and would have done so even if the economy had not skidded to a recession.
The simple fact is that the UAW wants the taxpayer to support a failed business model. It has nothing to do with "preserving the middle class," the great majority of whom do not work for GM or Chrysler and do not receive wages and benefits comparable to those of UAW members. It's more like robbing Taxpayer Peter to pay GM executive, GM dealer and UAW worker Paul. That isn't creating growth or more employment or preserving the middle class; it's shuffling money from one less powerful group (taxpayers) to the more politically connected players.
And please note that the domestic auto industry now includes the North American-based operations of Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, BMW and Mercedes. It isn't limited to the Big Three anymore.
Something the UAW hates to admit. Investors & Inventors are unique individuals. Us workers are plentiful and a commodity that is governed strictly by supply and demand. With 30 Million illegals about to become legal immigrants the work pool becomes further diluted making the $15 per hour non skilled UAW workers even less valuable. Ask the CA grocery workers that went on strike and ended up with minimum wage new hires.
And please note that the domestic auto industry now includes the North American-based operations of Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, BMW and Mercedes. It isn't limited to the Big Three anymore.
And soon to be VW and Audi. There will be US workers building cars. Just not as many in the old D3 UAW. The states losing out need to grab a hold of the UAW leadership and let them know they are no longer welcome in their states. Pass right to work and get some of the jobs back. Only a dumb investor would take a chance on manufacturing in Michigan with the Union entitlement mentality.
"United Auto Workers members working for Deere & Co. have voted overwhelmingly to authorize union negotiators to call a strike, if necessary, in their contract talks with the company.
UAW locals voted 98.1 percent in favor of strike authorization..."
Deere union receives authority to strike (Waterloo Courier)
UAW locals voted 98.1 percent in favor of strike authorization..."
Will they ever learn???...even a dog or cat eventually learns from their mistakes, but when I said the low-IQ idiots of the UAW, I never REALLY knew how accurate I was...
Oops, wrong discussion and it wasn't new. I was on the 4 lane highway going through one of the bedroom towns here, when it passed going the other way, pulling an old small sized hay baler. Looked like it was well screwed together too.
Ok, so I read the article, and this is in it............
".....The UAW and Deere are renegotiating terms of a six-year agreement that expires Sept. 30. The strike authorization vote has historically been considered a formality in Deere-UAW talks as the contract deadline approaches.
The parties may continue negotiating beyond the Sept. 30 deadline under an extension of the existing agreement"
...........and realize that, based on my experience, your comments are much ado about nothing. Strike autorization votes are taken in advance of expiring contracts "just in case". In the last 4 contract negotiations our IBEW locals have had with Verizon, we have authorized a strike 4 TIMES!!! Guess what?? Only once, in 2000, did we actually strike, and it was for 2 weeks. The consensus among us was that Verizon management held out for that long so it would make the national news, as Bell Atlantic and GTE had just merged weeks prior, and the Verizon name was only out for a few weeks (in other words, FREE ADVERTISING).
The last 3 negotiations continued well past the deadline, and we worked under the expired contract, and it was NO BIG DEAL.
I will assume that this is NO BIG DEAL.
Oh I forgot they have a nice golf course.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32899266/ns/business-autos/?ns=business-autos
No one is playing by the same rules. If the American consumer knew about the environmental crimes, exploitation of child labor, and the rape of the planet, this whole thing would come to an end. They would opt to buy UAW and or union made in America. All of these companies are backed by their nations respectively. Or is the China tire event a aberration? Wake up and smell the coffee. The free market capitalism is but an ideal. Not to mention that trading with China is outright support of communist ideals, and their oppression of mankind. Those millionaires being made in China are just high level communist officials and their relatives want the status quo to linger for as long as it can. No multinational corporation run a gov't for the purpose of profit? Casting aside Cuba, a lesser oppressor of its population, to go after market share in the golden China, in their blinding greed. Get with it, if it weren't for unions you wouldn't be as fortunate as you are now. To label a union man such as Walter "communist" is not going to work these days, as it did in the day of Joe McCarthy. Your going to have to find evidence of his selfishness and not of selflessness. Sorry I had to dls-spell the myth, which you may have had for decades now, of the founding fathers being crooks, no better than those of today.
http://www.treehugger.com/468_china-pollution-prob-001.jpg
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Environment/Pix/pictures/2009/7/31/124905222- - 4416/China---Environment---Pol-001.jpg
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/08/25/world/26china_span.jpg
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/china20_terrorist_1.jpg
http://mancelovici.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/nike_child_labor.jpg
http://www.stolenchildhood.net/entry/ejf-report-children-behind-textile-products- - /
I am glad to see your anti communist sentiments. However you seem to gloss over the FACT that Walter Reuther was a communist sympathizer. He was one of the elites you seem to hate. He would have been a Communist party boss in the USSA if FDR had gotten his way.
Reuther was a Socialist party member; he may have paid dues to the Communist Party for some months in 1935-36; he has been accused of attending a Communist Party planning meeting as late as February 1939. Reuther cooperated with the Communists in the later 1930s; this was the period of the Popular Front, and they agreed with him on internal issues of the UAWwiki
And I realize he waffled in later years. Which was a smokescreen to his true Socialist beliefs.
I would be fine not allowing any product into the USA that is produced with child labor under the age of 12. Or is highly polluting the environment. Not just CO2. Though I was working a lot way before the age of 12, mowing lawns and doing yard work all over our neighborhood. I had no Union and did not need one. Kids should have jobs to teach the a work ethic that is all but missing in today's society. Much of it perpetrated by lazy featherbedding Unions like the UAW.
Toyota, Honda, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes and Hyundai are building cars HERE, in the U.S. and Canada. They are not building them in China for export to the U.S.
GM and Chrysler are getting beaten by manufacturers who are building their products here, or in Europe, Japan and South Korea, which do not use child labor and have strict environmental regulations.
dallasdude: To label a union man such as Walter "communist" is not going to work these days, as it did in the day of Joe McCarthy. Your going to have to find evidence of his selfishness and not of selflessness.
I don't have to find anything, because I never mentioned Mr. Reuther in my posts, and never called him a communist. :confuse:
dallasdude: Sorry I had to dls-spell the myth, which you may have had for decades now, of the founding fathers being crooks, no better than those of today.
I never made that allegation. It's best to respond to what other posters actually said, not what you imagine they had said.
MO school pay
GM and Chrysler will continue to be beaten as long as the UAW stays in force. That's a simple fact that is as clear as daylight.
Regards,
OW
http://www.uaw.org/uawmade/auto/2010/index.cfm
OK let the fecal matter flinging beginnnnn.......................................................................- ................................................................................- ................................................................................- ...................................NOW!!!!! (duck) :surprise:
That is a great point. But until they do, and until we find out if it was worth it, it is what it is. Just a vote. Everybody is still working (for now)
HEY!!! WAIT A MINUTE!!!! Those millionare commies are buying American built (in some cases, like the Enclave) BUICKS. Even if they are built in China, GM still profits. So, they can't ALL be bad. :P
"Why do Communists think I'm dangerous and why does the right wing think I'm dangerous? It's because I'm committed, I think, to basically trying to find a way to make our free society responsive to human needs and only as we make it more responsive can we make it work and succeed. And to the extent we make it succeed, we frustrate their hopes and their plans. The John Birch Society is really a kind of fifth column for the Communists and the Communists are really a kind of fifth column for the John Birch Society. They'd die if you tried to make them believe this but these are the facts of history - the extreme forces in any situation always converge against the middle."
Reuther is not a socialist. Neither is he an uncritical admirer of free enterprise. He believes in what he calls an economic mix. That is, free enterprise - "the market place" - should be given the opportunity and incentive for doing what it does best, as building automobiles. In other areas, such as education and housing, he feels that government and individuals have a role to play.
http://www.wvculture.org/history/labor/reutherwalter01.html
That probably explains why my Dakota needed head gaskets replaced at 18,000 miles.
That doesn't make sense. Were the Toyota sludge (gel
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
That was exactly my point but some missed the point as an E-4 passed overhead.
The workers assemble what they're given. If the assembly in not correct, then the workers may be to blame; otherwise, it is the company that's responsible.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
When they have the UAW lable, it seems their brains turn to jello and the concept of "pride and workmanship" leaves their cerebral cortex...that is why I think the UAW did more to destroy the Big 3 than the engineers did when they designed the Buick Roadmaster, a vehicle that makes a Mack Truck look small and narrow...